Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel (Fool #3)(78)

See, of Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays, thirty-three of them are derived from other sources: Italian love stories, or history, or myth, or in some cases, just lifted from someone else’s play (King Lear). Unfortunately for me, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not one of the thirty-three. Sure, Hippolyta is first mentioned in Greek mythology as the daughter of Ares, the god of war, and the queen of the Amazons, and is killed by Heracles for her girdle, killed by Theseus at her wedding, or killed by another Amazon fighting beside Theseus at her wedding, but generally, her role in mythology is to have a magic girdle, become a prisoner of war, and get killed at a wedding.

Theseus, on the other hand, is an epic hero, and appears in the Odyssey, where he slays the Minotaur; jilts Ariadne, who gave him the thread to get out of the Minotaur’s maze; kidnaps Helen of Troy (whom they just called Helen when she was at home in Troy); and generally does a lot of fighting and questing stuff—so, a great backstory, but the Theseus of myth is clearly not the staid and formal character Shakespeare portrays in MSND. So he offers little help in expanding the story, except to serve as another noble from whom Pocket could “take the piss.”

The fairies, I thought, surely they will offer some unexplored gem of myth that I can festoon with knob jokes! And while Oberon, it turns out, appears first in a thirteenth-century French heroic song, Huon de Bordeaux, as Auberon, a fairy king who helps Huon (the knight who kills Charlemagne’s son) work off his crime with quests, about Oberon’s character we are told almost nothing except he is the son of Julius Caesar and Morgan le Fay. Really? Ancient Britain? So the Oberon of myth is what we in literature call “a frog fart in a wind storm,” and, although interesting, he isn’t as interesting as Shakespeare’s Oberon, who sets up his wife to shag a were-donkey over a little Indian boy with whom he is inexplicably obsessed.

And Titania doesn’t show up in literature at all, it appears, until Shakespeare names her in the play in 1595, although the entire MSND play may have been inspired by the success of Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, which was written for Queen Elizabeth five years before, and which met with great approval by the queen and other dignitaries in court who were mentioned in the poem. It might be noted, however, that while Spenser’s fairy queen, Gloriana, is a chaste and virtuous virgin (the hero of book II, Guyon, is the leader of the Knights of the Maidenhead—I’m not making that up), which is why Elizabeth I loved her, Shakespeare’s Titania is an egregious floozy, which is why audiences love her. So there were possibilities, but nothing quite as fun as what was already in the play. (It should be noted, though, that the first and second moons of the eighth planet are named for Titania and Oberon and even now they are chasing each other around Uranus.)

The other characters are numerous and almost indistinguishable from one another, and the lovers are mostly annoying, although the magic potion Puck puts in the boys’ eyes was a fun device, a version of which I used in Fool, the first of Pocket’s adventures. The lovers are made doubly annoying by a habit of Shakespeare’s that we learn not to do on the very first day of Famous Novelist School, which is giving characters names that start with the same letter. It’s so annoying and often confusing that I even found myself having to look back to the character list at the beginning of the play to keep Helena and Hermia straight. On the stage, where each character is represented by a different actor, not a big deal, but on the page, where they are but names, a huge pain in the ass. So I found no backstory to expand there.

So left with nothing to expand the story, I came back to where I started with the inspiration in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck, Bottom, and the Rude Mechanicals. See, Pocket himself, although he first appears in the context of King Lear in Fool, was born of Puck and Nick Bottom. His name, in fact, is a fusion of Puck and Bottom. Like the Puck, he is a rascal, a servant with more presence than his masters, a catalyst for the action, and, like Nick Bottom, he is rather inexplicably used and abused by powerful females, and not entirely against his will. The Mechanicals, the ragtag group of well-intentioned working-class dolts, are more or less the team that Pocket has to put together to accomplish his mission. His Seven Samurai, his Dirty Dozen, his Impossible Mission Force. With a monkey. The key, then, was to give them a mission to accomplish. So, as one does, I murdered the Puck.

He’s everywhere, at warp speed, with unimaginable magical powers, yet beyond seducing the odd joiner’s wife or shagging the odd marmot, he seems rather humble and subservient. It could not stand, and leaving Puck and Pocket too long in the same story is one rascal too many, so down goes Puck. So everyone has a mission: find the killer.

I am always drawn to Shakespeare’s subservient characters: Emilia, Iago’s wife in Othello; Nerissa, Portia’s maid in The Merchant of Venice; Shylock’s daughter, Jessica; even Kent, in King Lear (and Oswald in Lear makes for a terrific minor villain). They’re more often than not more clever and more noble than those they serve, and often, they are the only speakers of truth in a play, yet they function as foils, sometimes little more than placeholders. And there’s no more interesting group of foils to me than the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I brought them into Pocket’s mission force to sort of explore their own agendas.

I sense you thinking, “What about the squirrels?”

The squirrels are mine, not Shakespeare’s. These days I do my writing at a small getaway hovel in the redwoods, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco, a place I affectionately call the Squirrel Ranch. The room where I write is three stories up and surrounded by redwood trees, so I quite literally work among the squirrels. I started feeding them a few years ago, so now at any given time there are one or two fluffy-tailed rodents out on the deck crunching away on peanuts or walnuts or sometimes pizza, pretending they don’t see me or the other squirrel sitting right there. (Gray squirrels are solitary feeders, but they know a good deal when they see it, so even if it’s against their nature, they’ll put up with each other if there’s a free lunch. Authors are like that as well.) I guess they sort of worked their way into the story, because it occurred to me that there would be some fun possibilities if the fairies changed into squirrels during the day. So there you have it. The elements that went into making Shakespeare for Squirrels.